DIYDNF

In the world of Geocaching, DNF means Did Not Find.  In the world of home improvement, DIY means Do It Yourself.  Somewhere in my world, DIYDNF means Did It Myself; Did Not Fix.

For a few years I’ve had this keyboard that I picked up in a thrift shop for something like $100.  My evaluation of it once I got it home was that this keyboard had problems.  Its pitch would wander, sometimes higher, sometimes lower.  It got stuck in a closet while I determined what to do about it.

There is a repair shop about 90 minutes away that handles keyboards and after a long, long time, I finally dragged it out there on New Years day.  Sadly, they wouldn’t work on it because there were no parts from the manufacturer and no service manual.  I actually had a copy of the service manual, but whatever.  So I lost 3 hours and had a approximately 80 pound anchor on my hands.

I started doing some research online and after watching a repair video of the same model keyboard figured I could attempt the repair myself.  And to some degree, it wouldn’t be so expensive to try as a last resort.  Of course, expensive is something that comes with time and is usually not in the initial budget.

After watching many repair videos, the plan was to replace the main capacitors.  Kind of like when a CD player doesn’t work, you first replace the belts. That’s the way it is with a lot of older electronic gear.  The videos I watched, over and over, replacing the capacitors solved the majority of problems.  So that was my plan.  Now to buy everything I’d need to accomplish something like that.

What do I own now that I didn’t before?

  • Soldering station
  • Silicone soldering mat
  • 300+ capacitors
  • Two different solder wicks

Overall, maybe I spent $150 for this endeavor.  And because of the time it took to get all of these things, I had a lot of anticipation and excitement to get started.  The last piece arrived today and I immediately got to work.

Before I start that, I need to explain that in the time waiting for some of the pieces, I practiced on a dead circuit board – removing and replacing capacitors.  I thought I was doing really good.  It wasn’t difficult at all.  I was instructed the ideal way was to use the solder wick to remove the old solder, but I had zero success with that and chose a two-step process of removing the component, then using a solder sucker to clear the mounting holes.  My technique worked very well.

Doing it for real then.  I had to remove the existing three capacitors.  That went pretty smoothly.  Step two was to clear the mounting holes.  This did not go well, at all.  I ended up with some solder in the holes and it would not come out.  I tried my usual technique.  I tried using wick.  I tried other people’s tips like adding more solder to pull the solder in the hole out.  Nothing was working.  It was probably about 45 mins of fighting with greater and greater desperation, eventually resulting in me damaging the board.  But there was a hole.

Tired and disappointed, I mounted and soldered the new capacitors in place.  The first one went well.  The other two did not, but I did get them in place.  Now it’s time to reassemble and see the results, if any.  I mounted the main board back in the case, laid the keyboard back, and brought the control panel back for connection.  Wiring up power and audio cables and flipped the switch.

It powered up.  I pressed some keys.  No sound.  Oh yeah, volume.  I had sound.  It sounded pretty good and I was feeling pretty good.  I powered up another keyboard to get a pitch comparison.  Hmm.  Slightly detuned.  I did a factory reset on the panel and tried again.  Now the pitch was off by an entire semitone.  Worse.  I held some notes and I could actually hear the pitch slowly changing -  up and down.  So, experiment unsuccessful.  Any further troubleshooting is out of my league.  I’ve literally watched the pros do it and I don’t understand what they’re doing and how they arrive at their ideas.  I don’t have an electrical engineer background.

So, to the garage for the keyboard for now.  I’m pretty sure it’s going to the dump.  I considered maybe parting it out on eBay, but what a hassle.  I already have a bunch of stuff I need to list and I can’t find the motivation to do it.  Maybe it will come in the next few days.  But for right now, I need to pack up my new tools of my failed hobby.

Farewell To Tweets

Since this is an unprecedented event in my time, I figured I’d at least record my thoughts on it to remember exactly what it was like.  I am referring to the sudden, rapid implosion of Twitter.  Since I’ve been a wordy motherfucker for decades, I obviously have no interest in Twitter.  It never suited my purposes and I never "got" what it was trying to sell.  So, this is clearly an outsider’s opinion.

Let’s start with my issues with the man behind the destruction.  Elon "This isn’t even my final form" Musk has been insufferable for years now and this is just the latest deed.  Fortunately, this is the one that pulls the curtain back on his actual lack of ability.  A spoiled brat falling upwards until he now seems to have reached the ceiling.  The only thing you can give him credit for is bankrolling other people’s ideas, like EV and space transportation.  I don’t buy for a minute all the people who say, "he’s a genius.  I’ve heard him talk and he knows his stuff."  He only has a skill of regurgitating other people’s knowledge, which is also a skill of a huckster.  He also has the self-important aura that makes him appear superior to others.  It’s no wonder he is an authoritarian, it’s his trajectory.

One of the biggest, biggest things that pisses me off about the Twitter problem is that it didn’t have to be a problem.  Everything Musk complains about is from his own doing.  Losing $4m/day?  It wasn’t before you got there.  Overstaffed, unproductive workers, company costs too high?  Wasn’t before you got there.  If Musk had just been a slightly better person and not tried to do some obvious market manipulation, resulting in him being forced to make good on an offer that was only supposed to make him richer, Twitter might still be around.

Next in line for gripes is the complete foolishness of Musk’s "management" style.   It’s not really management, it’s just barking orders.  The whole idea of, "I am the single source of guidance and direction" is impossibly stupid in an organization.  And as much as I hate to bring this other asshole into the conversation, it’s just like Trump being president.  Businesses and governments are built on a hierarchy for a very good reason.  It frees the people at the top from having to worry about the details, but authoritarians have to control every little detail.  And it sucks for everyone involved because there is no consistency and the second in command remains as clueless as the commoner.  Why even have a hierarchy then?

All of this superiority complex leads to the next point of stupidity.  Walking in on day one and firing the people in charge, then firing half the staff before you even understand how the company operates, then threatening the remaining people with double the workload and no additional incentive – still before you understand how the company runs – then, once a large number of those remaining people have bowed out, finally asking to be clued in as to how things work.  Any intelligent businessperson would spend months analyzing the system from the inside before making any changes.  Musk is lucky any of the other companies he bought survived his leadership and managed to stay on their original track.

I feel like I could go on, but I want to address the now and future of Twitter the service.

So, pre-Musk (PM), Twitter had a real problem with the quality of its userbase.  It had lots of harassment, incitement, and general bad behavior.  But so does every other social media site out there.  In that way, I am anti-social media in total.  I don’t think it has proven to be a good mechanism for communication.  The strengths it touts, allowing you to send off a quick message, as well as quickly reply in kind, are actually the wrong things to be promoting.  Spur-of-the-moment, off-the-cuff, spontaneous messages, spoken without consideration, as well as knee-jerk, impulsive responses, are not a conversation.  They are not anything but thoughts, and they lead to people doubling down and digging in on things they never should have said and can’t bring themselves to apologize for.  So again, quick messages are not good.

However, when it comes to news and alerts, quick messages are great.  And now a lot of governments and officials are wondering how they’re going to get the same effects after Twitter dies.  And again, I’m going to say, Twitter is not good for this use case either.  The problem I am focused on is that a lot of "alerts" are not internationally important or relevant.  The ones that people are worried about: active shooter, natural disaster, policy changes – these are all regional.  It does me no good to hear about an active shooter in CA when I’m across the country.  As best it’s a distraction.  And that’s the term I want to apply to Twitter broadly, it’s a distraction.  It causes you to concern yourself with things that are not something you can do anything about and are not time sensitive.  This is the problem the 24hr news cycle started and Twitter just turbocharged it.  So, I feel that governments are going to go back to the way they used to issue alerts, which were more regional. Journalists that cover those regions will subscribe to those alerts and will amplify the message appropriately. 

And I think what’s going to close up this post is the observation from someone who was there before the internet and seen how things got better and worse.  While the internet has been invaluable for accessing information that is more of a static nature, it has been more of a detriment for more transient information.  There’s lots of news that doesn’t need to be consumed right at the moment.  Even big news, like the Queen is dead, could wait for the evening.  That news doesn’t change what I am going to be doing for the day.  Again, it’s a distraction.  And I think the number of distractions we’re facing in a day is causing some serious societal harm.  I feel like I’ve written about this before, where if you read about 10 rapes in the news in a day, they feel like they’re all in your neighborhood.  The whole idea of being an interconnected world is not so appealing when you have to also bear the weight of the entire world’s problems.

It’s almost like we need some sort of hierarchical structure for news.

The Mail Must Go On

At some point this week, my communication system reached a tipping point.  Google had decided to block my mail server.  This is something that had been brewing for some time and it finally got to where I had to act.

My first experience with the mail issues occurred a while ago when someone asked if I would do some consulting for them.  I was on the fence about doing any side work, but replied and said we could talk about it.  Their mail server bounced my message back to me because my mail server was on a blacklist.  I contact the blacklist registry and appealed the block and they say it got removed.  That was fine, because I then never responded to the consulting requests again and it got me out of that situation.

Occasionally, I would have instances where I was told emails sent to me were rejected because my mail server was not considered trustworthy and looked like a spam server.  And the primary reason for this was that it looked like I was running a mail server on a dynamic IP address, which anyone can do and the dynamic nature helps spammers avoid detection and consequences.

But I don’t have a dynamic IP.  I have a static IP, and I need that to receive email reliably.  The issue at hand was that the reverse DNS for my IP address did not have my domain name and instead looked like a generic ISP host name.  Very sketchy.  And I knew this was the problem and ignored it for some time because it never really was that big of a problem.  Until it was.

So I contact Frontier, who is my ISP, for assistance.  I get on their help chat and make my request.  As I completely expected, they had no idea what I was talking about.  I got transferred to an "expert" support person who eventually told me, "Your request is not a level of support we can provide."  Now there’s a few ways to take a statement like that.  The knee-jerk reaction is "LET ME TALK TO YOUR MANAGER!"  I read more into that statement and took a more diplomatic approach. "Can that level of support be offered via phone?"  And the response was simply, "I do not know that."  Depending on your mood, this exchange could be read as sincere or as dismissive.  I chose the former.  I asked for the phone number for business support and got it (the number was wrong by one digit, but I figured it out), then I made the phone call.

I spoke to a tech pretty quickly.  I need to point out that the support in all of these cases was uncharacteristically quick – not much wait time at all.  He asked how he could help and I explained: "I need a reverse DNS entry created in your system that points my static IP to my domain.  Does any of that make sense to you?"  No, it didn’t.  But to his credit, he did not give up and say he couldn’t help.  Like many IT workers at many businesses, he’s working remote and has to use chat to communicate with his team and get assistance.  That was a slow process and he was not getting much help.  While we waited, I explained that while this might be an unusual request, it really isn’t when dealing with businesses and static IP circuits.  I started my IT career in ISPs, so I know about requests like these.

We were getting closer to giving up and I was sort of pressing to find out who the next level of support I needed to call would be.  He explained that the higher levels of support were all done by ticket systems and there wasn’t any number to call.  And then, he got a response from a lead support tech that provided the answer.  What I needed to do was sent an email to hostmaster with a request for my PTR records and it would be done.  That’s it.  I can do that.  I was actually surprised Frontier even maintained a hostmaster email, since such a standardized name would be a total target for spam and whatnot.  I thanked my tech and got off the phone.

I created a simple email to the hostmaster with my account info, my IP address information, and the PTR record with its current hostname and the desired host name.  I got an automated email within a few minutes that a ticket had been opened and would be processed in order.  The next day, I got a plain, simple email saying the record was created.  and that was it.  That problem was solved.

But, times have changed and email servers have many more tests they need to pass to be considered trustable.  A few things I had never heard of like SPF and DMARC records needed to be added to my DNS server.  And with those done, I guess I have to wait a couple of days for all the DNS changes to propagate and see if it had any improvement.  So, I hope I’m on my way to being a trusted source of email on the Internet.  Security never sleeps.

Black Cat Season

A few updates on the newest member of the pride.  Last Saturday, a thin, hungry cat came to the house and was taken in.  Now that I’ve had the opportunity to have said cat checked out by the vet, some more details have come to light.

First, the cat is much less female than originally thought.  This actually was not established by the vet.  But let’s step back a moment.  First off, I didn’t want to name this cat because I didn’t really know if I’d be keeping him.  As his name was not defined, I called him NULL, and that name started growing on me.  My colleagues agreed NULL is a fitting name for a black cat.

So, come the day of the vet appointment, NULL was placed into a carrier and we began our trip.  Before even getting out of the driveway, he unleashed a deep, guttural howl of displeasure.  And he kept it up the whole way there.  So, NULL does not travel well.

Once in the exam room, the vet assistant took NULL to the table and I heard yet another new sound, growling.  And the growling got worse and stronger the more he got examined.  After the guy left to do some treatment planning, I held a very angry NULL and tried to get him to calm down.  At one point I thought I’d get bit as he bared his teeth at me, but in a few minutes, he did settle down and resumed purring and head-butting.

Then the doc came back in and it started over again.  Before they took him back for the battery of shots, I asked if we could scan for a microchip.  To all of our surprise, there was one.  I said I still wanted him brought up to standard, so they took him in back.

While I waited, the receptionist brought out a paper with the contact information for the chip registry.  The next thing of great interest was that NULL was not as young as assumed.  The chip was last updated 11/24/2013, probably the time of adoption.  So, I have a 9 year old cat on my hands.

The vet brought NULL back and said he tried to eat everyone while he was being treated.  I paid the $300 for all the work and went home.  I’m not sure I’m going to return to that vet.  They had taken over the practice of the vet I’d been to for many years and well, I’m just not impressed.

So back home, I call the microchip registry.  They confirmed that I have a black domestic shorthair, yes.  And they tell me, "His name is Chunk."  So first of all, he’s a boy, which was unknown at that time (because the vet took me at my assumption and didn’t verify). And next, "Chunk?"  Whatever.

The rep said the record had a privacy hold on it so she couldn’t give me the owner’s info, but if I would release my info, they would contact the owner and tell them how to contact me.  I agreed and I’m now waiting.  To be honest, I think I have a new cat.  I don’t think someone just loses a cat after 9 years.  I don’t think a cat just runs away from home after 9 years, especially one as loving and clingy as this one.  I am pretty sure the owners will not contact me.

So how is NULL doing?  Very happy.  Now understanding he’s an old boy, his behavior makes a lot more sense.  He loves nothing more than to sit on your chest and get in your face.  But the saddest part is seeing how much he lost.  He knows what a treat bag is.  He knows the word "dinner".  He found the cat toy box up on a shelf and picked out a catnip toy and went insane over it.  He’s a very experienced cat who used to have all these things and ended up homeless.

But things are going to get better for him.

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Cats Just Know

My neighborhood has a lot of street cats.  Infuriatingly, the sheriff at the end of the street is the one who has a large colony.  So while his employer tries to get it into everyone’s head that you’re supposed to spay and neuter your cats to avoid overpopulation, he can’t be fucking bothered.  So a couple times each year, there’s a new batch of kittens and some survive to adults and others, who knows.

These cats have a pretty big patrol area.  Some come into my yard and piss off my two.  Sometimes there’s even screaming matches in the middle of the night that I have to go out and break up.  So usually when I see one of these assholes, I’m pretty hostile and scare it off.  I know most of the repeat offenders.

But last night, there was a new face in my driveway.  And oddly, she didn’t dash away when I stopped and got out.  So I got down and called her.  To my surprise, she cautiously came over and was immediately friendly.  So she’s probably a neighbor’s cat, but not one I’d ever seen before, and I know the nearby cats, who are generally friendly to me, if not to my cats.

But this new one was thin.  Bony.  And she had obvious battle marks with some lost fur around her head and neck.  Since I had just come back from the store, I pulled out a serving of wet food and offered it to her.  It was gobbled up with no hesitation.  Well, if she’s homeless, she knows where food is now.  I left her outside and went in for the night.

This morning, I didn’t see her out, but when I returned from lunch, I spotted her watching me from behind the neighbors tree.  I sat down and again she came right over.  Now in the daylight, I could see she wasn’t in very good shape.  Her fur was dry and dirty and bare around her back legs.  She was thinner than I thought, also.  But she is a fully black cat, and they say black is a minimizing color, so…

I gave her a quick once-over and when I found she was declawed in front, that sort of made up my mind.  She can’t stay outside, being defenseless.  It’s not surprising that she was on the losing end of fights.  This was probably an inside cat that had been abandoned.  So I began the process of rescue as best as I understood.  It’ll be a couple of days to schedule a vet visit, which is fine since that will give her time to get her acclimated to this place.  She wasn’t scared being moved into the garage, and she voluntarily stayed in there all day.  Food and water were greatly appreciated (especially the water) and she now has a towel and a chair to lie on.  I’ve set up a litter box and will have to see if she’s willing to use it.

I guess she knew from the start this was the place to be.  She’s ok with being held, has no problems with being on a lap, gives headbutts and drools out of happiness.  She’s already started grooming herself, which bodes well for her mental state.

The bigger unknown lying ahead is the integration into the house with the other two.  I’m trying to ease that pain by letting my two cats smell my hands every time I come back in the house.  The two are very interested in the smells and don’t seem to be upset by them, so I’m cautiously optimistic.  If I can keep this up for a week or so, and maybe swap towels to get more scent exchange, there may be a chance.  But the next step at the moment is getting the new one to the vet for evaluation.  Who knows, maybe she’s chipped and lost.

Saving a black cat just before Halloween season.  Of course.

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To SRQ

That’s Bradenton, BTW.

As work issues continue, and it’s been over three weeks at this point, I’m bouncing between the mindsets of "I need to take advantage of this free time" and "I need to be conserving cash and making contingency plans".  However, trying to be optimistic, I did break away on a Friday to go to on a thrift run.  I also had plans to go out of state on the weekend, but the success of this run put off that more-distant run for another week.

With my now routine procedure of building a list of starred places in Google maps for all the shops in the area to visit, I left the house right after the company’s weekly status meeting – around 9:30.  It will take me about 90 minutes to get to my first stop: an antique mall.  As I got closer, I realized I was really cutting it close on gas.  When my low fuel light comes on, I can pretty much count on over 30 miles left.  But still, once the needle moves below the E line, it gets a little nervous. 

Today I was taking the MX-5, so I did not have Android Auto to guide me.  I had a Garmin GPS, which didn’t have a lot of the stops in its POI database, so I had to manually enter addresses for most.  I tried setting up my phone in another window mount, but Google Maps was not giving me voice directions.  I tried using Android Auto on the phone, but Google has updated the software to only work when attached to a car screen.  That’s so lame.  So Garmin did what it could with the addresses I pulled from my phone.

I had to overshoot the first stop to get to a gas station, filled up and went back.  Traffic in this area is really stupid.  It’s a Friday morning, but it feels like a Saturday afternoon.  And anyway, nothing of note at the first stop.  The next two were "flea markets", which were really nothing of the sort.  The first was more like a vendor mall, which yielded one CD.  the other was just a hoarder.  But that was the intro to the city, and now I would be hitting proper thrifts.

It had been a while since I’d been to this area, so only a few places were familiar to me, many were new.  I can thank my pre-planning for the discovery of all the new places.  In summary, there were only two places that I really bought multiple CDs.  The first one I had been to before and it was a church thrift shop.  I got to hear a heated discussion between a Biden and a Trump supporter, which is always disheartening.  That got me to speed up my search and got me right out of there.

One shop that I hadn’t been to before was the crown jewel of my trip.  Usually, you can find one or two albums by an artist, but in this place, there was a large collection of early Neil Diamond.  He’s not one of my favorite artists, but I do have some albums of his and when I do have some of an artist, I try to complete the full discography.  Especially when I can do it cheaply and the CDs are early pressings.  And this was the case.  I picked out seven albums and actually left some behind.  Not much regret about leaving some, seven is plenty.  While pulling them out, I also spotted an early Olivia Newton-John disc, then another.  I grabbed three of those, one being a dupe of one I already had.  As it turns out, it was good I grabbed that dupe, because the disc inside was swapped with another, so I might’ve ended up with a mismatched case.  But the best news was that one of the ONJ albums was a highly desirable OOP album (out of print).  It sells on EBay for $50 (realistically priced) or $300 (unrealistically priced).  I left that shop with 13 discs.

By around 2:00, I was pretty hungry and tried going to a Wendy’s but they had a long line.  I then tried going to a Thai place, but it stunk so badly I wouldn’t have been able to sit there for any length of time.  I tried going to Jimmy John’s, but their lobby was closed.  I ended up at Chili’s for the first time in at least three years.  It was ok.  It made me sad that Chili’s used to have such incredible burgers and now they weren’t all that good.

And Chili’s was right near my last stop, which yielded three extra CDs, and I made my way home again.

So in summary, the whole trip was worth it for finding Olivia Newton-John – Totally Hot.  But overall, getting 22 CDs out of a run is pretty impressive.  Probably spent about $30 in gas, maybe $30 in discs.  I’ve been purchasing in cash when it’s under $10, so it’s kinda hard to track my total expenditures.  But it’s close enough.

To MEL

This week has been a not-so-good one with involuntary time off from work due to… problems.  I can’t really consider it time off, because it’s more like being on-call.  You can’t really relax and really take the day off because you don’t really know when you’re going to have to jump right back in.  Regardless, I did make a few half-hearted runs around the area and picked up a few CDs here and there.  But this weekend, I did want to make a concerted effort, and this time it was Melbourne.

Usually when I go to Melbourne, it’s at the tail end of going to Vero Beach, on the way back up north.  And Vero was my original idea, but I chose instead to make a shorter, closer run instead.  As it turns out, it was a very good run indeed.  I actually ran out of energy before I ran out of time or shops.

Performing my now-ritual of pre-mapping all the places to hit in Google Maps for Android Auto to utilize, I had a fair number of thrift shops and three music stores.  This time, I left earlier than usual, so I wouldn’t run out of time like I did last week.  I left the house around 8:00, hit DD for some breakfast and got on the highway.  I reached the first stop, a Goodwill, about 9:30.  I was like the second person there and when I was leaving, the cars were starting to come in.  But, nothing to be purchased there.

A lot of thrifts didn’t open until 10:00, so I drove around for more than I wanted to, wasting time.  But of the ones I did hit, I really only found one shop that had a number of CDs that were worth it.  I also found two antique malls that were not on my list.  I found a couple there.  Feeling a bit down by the lack of success at the thrifts, I pivoted and went to the first music store to hopefully get some positivity.

That music store didn’t have many CDs and the ones there were not that great.  But the owners were extremely helpful and went searching around their shop for more CDs for me.  The ones they found were better, but still not what I wanted.  But, then they found two MFSL gold CDs, one of which I already had and one I didn’t.  So I expressed interest in them and the owner went on Discogs to determine what price to charge.  Oh brother, here we go.

To my astonishment, she quoted me $30 for both, where I was mentally preparing for $50 each and prepared to walk away.  So, I made my first big score.  And they were happy, too.  They told me what other music stores had CDs (which were already on my list, but thanks).  And then they said to go to the flea market.  There’s a flea market?  Yes, with multiple CD vendors.  I couldn’t leave the shop quickly enough.

I got to the market and began tracing the rows.  Like the one last week, it had no directory and no map, but unlike the other, its layout was very simple: one long aisle with rows branching off it – no cross rows.  And I’ve not seen so many CDs at a flea market in a long time.  Daytona might not even have as many.  But for all that volume, the results were only ok, not excellent.  Probably 8 common CDs.  One shop had a coupled Glass Hammer CDs I had an interest in, but for some really weird reason, they priced them at $10 and $20.  No thanks.

It’s now 2:00 and I’m dying, dead on my feet, woozy, and stumbling.  I dig up a Carrabbas (which seems to be my new travel standard) and have a big lunch.  Then it’s off to another music store.  This store is much better than I expected.  I found one dupe target, one new target, and a few others of interest.  Maybe about $30 spent there.

I’m fading fast, so I decide to hit the one last music store and get back home.  This last place, I found three.  Two dupe targets.  I didn’t see everything, but what I didn’t see, the owner said is expensive stuff and he would look up prices for them.  And he was also waiting for me to leave as he was closing for the holiday weekend.  That was fine, I was pretty much done for the day anyway.

But then the guy wants to start talking.  Asks me if I’m interested in Santana.  I’m not, but he pulls out a sealed MFSL record box set from his showcase.  I think he said $4,000 for it.  Uh, no thanks.  He gets talking about how he closed on a local estate sale for a big local collector.  Not just big, massive.  Not just massive, unbelievable.  That sealed boxset was only one of many that the collector had.  The shop owner estimated the value of his collection at about $2M.  And he bought it for $380K.

Ok.  So.  I have thoughts.

First of all, how sad that the original collector had this incredible media and, as reported, an equally impressive stereo system, but never got to listen to some of the best recordings he owned.  He’s dead now.  He never got to hear them.  And for whatever he thought he was saving it for as an investment, he didn’t get that return.  He didn’t get anything, he’s dead.  His widow didn’t get the return on it either.

I’ve said in other posts that the size of a collection can negatively impact its total value, but there’s also a very small market for high-ticket items.  This shop owner is quite old himself.  Will he even sell those sealed box sets before he dies?  Will he see the return on his investment?  He surely won’t open the sets and listen to them, destroying the value of them.  The whole concept of investing in entertainment media is crazy to me.  Buy it and be entertained by it!

I definitely keep that in mind with my own collection.  The median value of my collection is about $16k.  Double that at the high-end and half that at the low end.  If someone going to pay me $30k for my CDs.  Of course not.  $8k?  Not likely.  $2k, possible.  I could add up all the gold CDs value and probably get $1000 just for them – sold individually.  But, my collection has been purchased cheaply and has been enjoyed at every stop of the way.  When I die, hopefully it will give someone one enjoyment instead of just sitting in a display cabinet.

Anyway, the tally for today: 30.  1 new gold, 1 dupe gold, 1 new target, 3 dupe targets, 1 dupe (potential upgrade), and 1 for its case.  The rest are new to me.

To RSW

RSW?  WTF is that?  Fort Myers.  Makes total sense.

So, to continue my shopping logs, today was a day to go to Ft. Myers, because I had found out there is a large flea market there.  In preparation, as I did with JAX, I went into google Maps and pinned all the thrift stores in the immediate area.  It’s been a little while since I’ve gone down that far, so I didn’t remember much of what was there.

I got on the road at around 8:30 and with a 2.5 hr drive time, I got into the area around 11:00.  As I got off the interstate, I saw a billboard for "huge flea market" at the next light.  It was not where my GPS was leading me, but I turned anyway.  The road took me to a different flea market.  Very interesting.  But it was not the market for me.  Not meaning any derision, this was a Hispanic flea market.  I was like the only white guy there.  There was only one booth that had CDs and they were all Latino artists.  So, while it was a huge flea market and if I needed produce or cowboy boots I would have been all set, there was nothing for me to buy there.

Back on track to the real flea market, FleaMasters.  It’s supposedly a very long-running market, so yay?  I arrive and park and make my way into the first building.  Within a few minutes, I find the "media" place.  It was a bookseller, but like many people who honor media, there were tapes, records, and CDs.

First off, everything was pretty disgusting, with a layer of dirt on it.  I can deal.  After maybe 50% review, I found one target CD.  The owner comes over to chat me up, says I must have an amazing collection if I’ve only found one CD so far.  He’s right.  We get talking about CDs and that’s pretty much the only thing he was right about.  Trying to tell me the target CD I had was a 2nd or 3rd pressing, probably from 1990.  Whatever.  He can be wrong, I’m just here to buy.  And everything is priced, so it’s not like he’s going to change the prices because I know what I’m finding.  In the end, I walked out with 6 CDs, only a couple of them dupes.  Probably about $5 each on average. 

Sadly though, that was it for the entire day.

I wandered around the sprawling market halls and got lost over and over.  It was beyond infuriating that they didn’t have a directory of vendors.  Even worse, they didn’t even have a map posted anywhere!  About 45 minutes later, I got back to my car with only the one shop to show for my effort.  Oh well, off to the thrifts.

Along with maybe half a dozen thrift stores, I also stopped at two record stores.  One had a sizable, but poor selection of CDs, and the other didn’t keep CDs at his store – he had a booth at FleaMasters.  Really, now.  I guess I’ll have to try harder next time.

I didn’t mention the sweating.  The market was HOT and the sweat was pouring down my back and filling my underwear.  Almost to the point I wondered if it looked like I was shitting myself.  And at one Goodwill, I found no CDs, but had to get a bottle of water ($2.50) and it was down in a flash.  That gave me a little more energy to go on.  But I think my body was in survival mode, because I wasn’t hungry, thirsty, tired, or angry.  I didn’t have a pressing need to go to the bathroom either.  That condition is probably dangerous for me.

I did stop soon after at Carrabbas and got soup and salad.  Downed a few glasses of liquid and got back on the road.  But still, by now, it’s after 2:00, my time is running short.

I made three more stops.  The Habitat ReStore was closed for the day, so really only two stops.  I tried to set the GPS for two more shops nearby and I was warned they would be closed before I got there.  Ok.  That’s the end of the day.

Set my course for home, hit a RaceTrac along the way, and cruised on back, with some rain showers along the way.  Arrived back home right at 6:00.  With the amount of gas I burnt today at the current gas prices, this trip was not worth the money.  Total outlay was about $30 and gas was probably about $50.  And a $20 lunch, yeah, definitely not worth the trip.

Recompromising

Well, that was a quick resolution.

In my last post, I was lamenting the financial vulnerability I had keeping the bulk of my liquid assets in my checking account, tied to an ATM card that I had to use 10 times a month in order to get a preferred interest rate.  My solution to reduce my liability was to move a large chunk of my money out to another savings account that didn’t pay as good of an interest rate.  So, problem solved.

Today, I was just doing some random account maintenance, and logged into my checking account.  There was a small ad/offer/banner that invited me to create a savings account on the home page.  Uninterested, really, but I clicked the link anyway.  It was a savings account that paid 1% on the entire balance, which is exactly what my checking account paid on the excess of the 4% preferred rate.

To most anyone, this would be a big meh.  It’s the same thing as keeping your money in the checking account.  Why bother?  But to me, this is exactly what I needed.  I needed to isolate the bulk of my money from anyone who could steal my ATM card.  There’s so many benefits of this to me, I can count them on one hand! (I’m saying there’s not a lot of benefits, but they are very important to my needs.)

So again, first priority is to isolate my cash from ATM thieves – check.  I can keep my checking account balance limited to the amount that gets the bonus interest.  Any small amount over that gets paid at 1% interest.

Second, keeping the (relatively) good interest rate on my large balance – check.  The compromise in my last post had me move a large sum to another online savings account, which currently pays .5% interest.  That’s actually better than it used to be, I guess since the recent interest rate hike by the Fed, but whatever, it’s still half of what I can get from T-Mobile.

Third, having quick access in case of fraud – check.  I had mentioned in the last post about a worst-case scenario, where a hacker does get your funds.  You can claim fraud, but money is not returned to you until after the investigation.  If you have funds elsewhere, you can move them in to fill the gap and pay bills, so automatic payments don’t fail or things get paid late.  But transferring from an external account can take a couple of days.  However, having the checking and savings account at the same bank?  Instant transfer with no delay.  There’s value to that.

So, yes, I did immediately open a savings account and tested out the funds transfer.  It was immediate, just as I expected.  Now I can begin moving funds back into this account to get my extra interest.

I think in a future post, I’m going to document the complexity of my financial web.  There’s eight bank accounts and two payment services that all link together and it would be a good opportunity to review them and visualize them for example’s sake.

Compromises

It was last year in March that I posted a gripe about a change to my T-Mobile checking account.  They had changed the requirements for how you get the bonus interest rate on their account.  Instead of making a direct deposit each month, you had to use the check card 10 times each month.  I didn’t like the change for the inconvenience it caused, but there was another concern that I had and I didn’t express it in that post back then.  Tonight, my concern became reality.

Lying in bed, ready to sleep and my phone goes off with a text message.  It says:

FreeMsg: Bankmobile Fraud Ctr: 18449392796 Case (redacted) Did you attempt $.00 at MOTHER GOOSE TI with card x8930? Reply YES or NO. opt Out reply STOP.

This brought me a bit of concern.  BankMobile is faintly familiar, but I wasn’t sure if that was my card number.  I climb out of bed and get on the computer.  Yes, it is my card number, and BankMobile is the bank.  I still think this might be a scam, though, so I call the bank directly, not using the number they provided.

Talking to the service rep, I am assured that there is nothing wrong with my card, but that the message is legitimate.  So, I say, ok, I’ll reply to the message after this call.  After the call, I reply NO and immediately get a reply saying my card is now locked.  Well, great.

Back on the phone again and explaining this new turn of events, and the rep says that there is a blank transaction on my card and my card is locked, so they will have to send me a new card.  Yeah, yeah yeah, this is nothing new to me, let’s go ahead with it.

But what IS new to me is that concern I’ve had since last March.  This card is tied to a massive (to me) amount of money.  Because of the excellent interest rate (4% on 3k and 1% on the rest), I keep the bulk of my money in there.  And EVERY TIME I am using my check card to get to my 10x transactions to qualify for the 4%, I am exposing myself to theft and fraud.  And within a year, in less than 150 transactions, it has happened.

I want to say just how careful I am with that card.  I just went through every statement in the last year and checked.  I’ve only used my debit card at 15 different places.  That is a crazy small number compared to how many places I use my credit card.  And that’s the part that freaks me out so much.  Debit cards don’t have the same fraud protections that credit cards do.  Yeah, sure, it’s covered, but if someone drains your account and you scream fraud, your money’s not coming back until they finish the investigation, as your bills go unpaid.

So where does that leave me?  For my financial security, I should give up the 1% interest on the large balance and only keep the amount that will get me 4%.  4% of $3k is $120/yr.  Not bad when all other places will get you like $3, $15 if you’re lucky.  But what’s the value of security?  It’s priceless.